"I suppose that it was his sympathy which gave him unbounded power of
winning confidence, and as a consequence made him highly successful as a
physician. He began to practise before he was twenty-one years old, and
his fees during the first year paid for the keep of two horses and a
servant. On the following year his practice was large, and so continued
for about sixty years, when he ceased to attend on any one. His great
success as a doctor was the more remarkable, as he told me that he at first
hated his profession so much that if he had been sure of the smallest
pittance, or if his father had given him any choice, nothing should have
induced him to follow it. To the end of his life, the thought of an
operation almost sickened him, and he could scarcely endure to see a person
bled--a horror which he has transmitted to me--and I remember the horror
which I felt as a schoolboy in reading about Pliny (I think) bleeding to
death in a warm bath...

"Owing to my father's power of winning confidence, many patients,
especially ladies, consulted him when suffering from any misery, as a sort
of Father-Confessor. He told me that they always began by complaining in a
vague manner about their health, and by practice he soon guessed what was
really the matter. He then suggested that they had been suffering in their
minds, and now they would pour out their troubles, and he heard nothing
more about the body...Owing to my father's skill in winning confidence he
received many strange confessions of misery and guilt. He often remarked
how many miserable wives he had known. In several instances husbands and
wives had gone on pretty well together for between twenty and thirty years,
and then hated each other bitterly; this he attributed to their having lost
a common bond in their young children having grown up.

"But the most remarkable power which my father possessed was that of